As organizations scale their use of cloud and keep pace with new technologies, managing costs become increasingly complex and challenging. Between shifting business priorities and growing deployment architectures, underused or over-provisioned resources are creating unexpected expenses. This can be a result of manual processes, fragmented visibility, and misaligned resource sizing.

Cost optimization provides an intentional, automated strategy to maximize return on investment. This includes monitoring project and resource costs against set budgets through automated shut-off, infrastructure-as-code, operational hygiene, and notification mechanisms. This combination of financial principles with modern cloud management practices helps organization reduce waste and gain greater control over their IT spend.

• Eliminate waste through proactive identification and removal of unused resources
• Right-size workloads by aligning resource allocations with actual usage patterns
• Improve visibility into spending across development, test, and production environments
• Leverage automation to manage lifecycle and shut down non-critical resources
• Take advantage of licensing and savings plans to reduce ongoing costs
• Strengthen security through governance of resource access and compliance
• Promote financial accountability with tagging, tracking, and reporting

At Keyva, we have identified several factors to consider when implementing a cost optimization program within your IT environment:

• Remove or Retire Unused Resources: Identify resources that are not in active use or necessary for ongoing efforts. This involves a meticulous review of each line item in the billing statement or each resource tracked for cost purposes, and can also be automated. Once this is complete you can free up capacity by either removing these resources or archiving them until a final decision is made.
• Over Provisioning or Under Provisioning: Optimize expenses by adjusting resource capacities to actual needs. By right-sizing resources, significant cost efficiencies can be achieved. This process typically involves collaboration across infrastructure, application, and database teams.
• Performance Monitoring: Utilize key performance metrics to monitor and remediate resources for an efficient infrastructure deployment strategy.
• Cohesive Asset Management Strategy: Leverage Configuration Management Databases (CMDBs) as a single source of truth, facilitating accountability and scheduled reporting to reduce wasteful spending. Scheduled reporting on identified metrics can highlight changes in usage of certain resources, and help plan for intentional changes.
• Tagging and Visibility: By implementing a cohesive tagging strategy, organizations can identify sources of wasteful spending and put controls into place for making efficiency gains.
• License optimization: Several vendor offerings allow migrations of licenses from on-prem to the Cloud. By putting emphasis on the licensing plan that works for you, organizations can save considerable costs while porting their workloads.
• Savings plans: All Cloud providers offer commitment or savings plans which can be leveraged for certain types of resources to make operating them more cost efficient. Knowing which plans to use for which resources and optimizing for that fit, several savings can be realized.
• Security: Embed security into automation frameworks, ensuring compliance and avoiding costly penalties by controlling access to critical resources. Non-compliant systems typically enhance the risk for failing SLAs.
• Automation: Implement infrastructure-as-code pipeline automation, GitOps and other automated frameworks to manage resource lifecycles efficiently, automatically un-provisioning after intended use in development and test environments. This will help you achieve both cost and maintenance efficiencies.
• Training and Knowledge Transfer: Facilitate the adoption of new practices through training and knowledge transfer, enabling teams to work with agile methodologies and infrastructure-as-code as part of their daily activities.

At Keyva, we apply proven frameworks and automation to help clients reduce cloud spend while maintaining operational performance. From tagging and reporting to license optimization and Infrastructure-as-Code lifecycle automation, our approach ensures that cost-efficiency is built into every stage of the cloud journey.

• Cost Inefficiency Identification: Conduct cost optimization studies to identify and rectify cost inefficiencies.
• Visibility of Individual Resource Costs:  Analyze IT spend with visibility at an individual resource level.
• Resource Usage Awareness: Implement cost-efficient protocols based on resource usage awareness to achieve cost transparency